Tony Vargas
Legend
Relative to typical D&D worlds like Oerth or FR, Middle Earth was a low magic setting.Or create some weird non-Tolkien or low magic setting.
Wow, guess a lot of DMs were having wrongbadfun back in the day - and are doing so again playing OSR games and, well, 5e, because 5e is pretty open to that style, again (in keeping with it's goals of supporting more styles, and being for everyone who ever loved D&D, including those older editions were 'gotchya' moments were de rigueur).This is all really simple. We're complicating it with assumptions and partial facts.
The core advice that should be given:
While a character can be tricked by an NPC, a player should never feel tricked by the DM.
Roll a deception check out in the open, and trust the player to RP appropriately. Not hard, but not the only way to do it 5e, where the DM is free to decide when a check is called for.How can a character be tricked without the player being tricked?
Sure. Not so much that it'd be unfair to the player, as it's just unlikely to be effective at moderating the player's bad behavior compared to just communicating honestly with him.A DM should never punish characters for player behavior.
Nothing you do in game as a DM should be punishment for the actions of a player. The character issues and the player issues are two separate things and need to be treated as such (to the extent possible).
Then again, bad player behaviors can spill over into RP and character actions, which may still have consequences in game...
Last edited: